splash image during boot - new applet?

[Yann E. MORIN]

Hello all!

On Monday 04 February 2008 17:39:58 Paul Fox wrote:
> how does a user-level daemon provide a nice "user experience"?  don't
> you still need kernel splash support in order to fill the screen
> until you get past init?

Assuming that getting up to init is fast enough (less than a few seconds),
then you could redirect kernel console to oblivion, and the only provide
user-space boot progress.

YThis is sensible IMHO because on embedded devices such as PDA, there are
no choice of system to boot (except if the user did press a combo at power
up), and initialising the HW + decompressing the kernel + getting down to
init is quite fast. One of my not so recent device does this in less than
3 seconds. Having a black screen during 3 seconds is OK IMHO.

So having splash only in userland seems OK. Plus the proposed applet is
generic enough (relies on FB) so that it makes sense to include it. Even
distro installers would benefit of this.

I would just add a note. Displaying an image as background is nice; having
a progress bar is nice. But I would suggest the possibility to add a
text field (empty by default?) which would be used to display boot process.
Usage would be such as:

  echo "42 Don't Panic!" >/tmp/splash.fifo

would set progress to 42 percent, and display the message "Don't Panic!"
in the text area. This would make a perfect splash applet!

Now I didn't think about font problems... Maybe use the FB's font...

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

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